The applications we create during the course of the competition will be gifted to different socially-minded organizations around the world. Once the fun is over, our work will live on and hopefully do a lot of good.

So get to it folks… Go talk to them and see what you can do! Beware that you’ll have to support the app properly later on so make sure you have enough capacity to pay for ongoing development and maintenance expenses afterwards. The last thing we need is another orphaned app like my poor Kikono.org (destroyed by spammers but it’ll come back I promise!)

You or may not have noticed that I wasn’t talking much about Kikono recently. However, I’ve been working with my designers on a new redesign of the site and it’s finally in a good enough shape that we can talk about it. I think it’s real purty and I’m hoping you folks do too. Anyway, I’ll be back to working on getting more nonprofit news feeds into Kikono so that the site becomes your one stop shop for all things nonprofit-y.

Kikono automatically takes the nptech and npmarketing tags straight into the “For Techies” and “For Marketers” categories so if you blog, all you have to do is add the right tag to your post and they’ll be in Kikono within five minutes. However, if you want to put your picture up there and craft a better summary and additional tags, you’re more than welcome to post your story straight into Kikono.

I didn’t have strict design specs though. Ramil asked me for a list of sites that I liked and I outlined those sites/templates in an e-mail to him:

1. Scribbish WP Template — http://quotedprintable.com/pages/scribbish – there’s a great implementation of the template at www.nubyonrails.com

2. competitious.com – i like the color schemes and layout

3. I like the screens for the Basecamp application — take a look at http://www.basecamphq.com/tour

4. I like the color schemes for geni.com

5. http://demo.rockettheme.com/ — Versatility II theme

6. I really like the way the gradients fall across the front page in http://demo.rockettheme.com/ — BentoBox Light Theme

In the midst of all of this, the new Colormatic template came out at rockettheme.com. I’m a sucker for complementary tritone color schemes so I added that to the list of “looks”. Ramil just basically kicked butt in the implementation and even fixed some problems that are still extant in the latest beta release of Pligg, the open source software that powers Kikono. There are probably a few fixes still left but we’ll get them resolve as they come up. For now, sign up and start posting your news over at Kikono!

It deserves all the attention it can get as I believe that Kikono is the next step toward rationalizing nonprofit news. BTW, I took a look at the tables for Kikono. The links tables alone are ripe for someone to write an OPML export for a Google CSE like Manseo. I’ve got lots of plans for Kikono – we’ll be doing a theme redesign and eventually inviting more nonprofit bloggers to join in on the fun.

kikono.org was selected as the new name for our social news site for nonprofits. Just kidding with the logo there — it was built on that Web 2.0 stylr thing. No, we’ll get a proper logotype together soon.

Change all your bookmarks! npdigg.org is officially kikono.org. Kik your tags to kikono! Here’s a list of some things that are going to happen to kikono.org

1. Move it to its own site

2. Make sure tag links are properly imported. I’ve already made slight mods to the code to do this right as well as import the original tag creator. However, I’m working with the Pligg devs in order to make RSS feeds from sources such as Feedblendr and del.icio.us to import very smoothly into kikono.org.

3. Site Redesign! I’ll try to get logo candidates and a modified theme together. Here’s a question — do you like the look of Non-Profit Tech Blog? Would you like it for kikono.org? Or something entirely different? Comment below.